Health Check Wi-Fi Survey

Our Approach

Are you experiencing problems with your wireless network? Are you suffering from connection dropouts or poor network throughput? Or are you just after confirmation that you’re getting the most out of your wireless network?

Our Health Check Wi-Fi Survey is an effective tool for diagnosing problematic Wi-Fi networks. Problems such as network dropouts, hidden nodes, RF interference and software bugs are just a few of the many hazards facing a wireless network. Our Health Check Wi-Fi Survey will examine all of these issues to determine what improvements can be made to realise performance gains.

Performing a Health Check Wi-Fi Survey is also a great way to baseline performance on your existing wireless network. As your wireless network grows in size, a Health Check Wi-Fi Survey can highlight potential issues before they become major problems.

These are some of the typical problems experienced:

Network performance or throughput.

RF interference.

RF coverage dead spots.

Wi-Fi security weaknesses.

Wi-Fi connectivity issues.

The Health Check Survey documentation includes:

Maps of the WiFi RF coverage, signal strength and SNR.

Spectrum analysis for detection and identification of RF Interference that could degrade performance of a Wi-Fi network.

Network Performance or Throughput

Are your Wi-Fi clients complaining about poor performance on your wireless network? Poor network performance is a serious problem that can have a major impact on business productivity. Poor network performance can be caused by a number of different issues and can be hard to diagnose without an in-depth analysis of the wireless network. We utilise tools such as active Wi-Fi surveying as well as Iperf Throughput testing to assess network performance.

Deep Packet Inspection

Deep packet inspection (DPI) can be an effective tool in diagnosing connection-related issues. This includes clients not roaming properly or Wi-Fi access points silently disconnecting users. Software bugs and odd behaviour can also be detected by utilising DPI. For example, The Wi-Fi data captured below shows pings being acknowledged by the Wi-Fi access point system but only 999-byte ping replies being sent back. This allowed us to conclude that the issue was a software-related bug with the Wi-Fi infrastructure and not a client issue. Having this evidence also allowed us to escalate the issue with the hardware vendor.

Spectrum Analysis

A complete spectrum analysis includes the detection, measurement and recording of RF Interference that could degrade the performance of a wireless network. Interference such as microwaves, PIR sensors, Bluetooth and legacy wireless devices can have a serious impact on your wireless network. We perform a spectrum analysis alongside the acitve survey to ensure any interference sources are identified. This increases the chances of interference detection from devices that are not transmitting constantly. Any interference sources are identified on site plans. The diagram below shows microwave oven interference detected during one of our site surveys.

RF Interference

High levels of RF interference are generally caused by poorly designed wireless networks that have not had a proper wireless network survey conducted. This results in adjacent access points operating on the same frequency channel and causes RF interference. This can result in dramatic reductions in network performance which exponentially worsens with increased network usage.

RF Coverage Dead Spots

RF coverage dead spots are typically the result of poorly designed Wi-Fi networks that have not had a proper Wi-Fi site survey conducted. Coverage dead spots can also be caused by not taking into account the different receive sensitivity levels of different client devices during the design of the wireless network.

Dead spots in your wireless network can sometimes be hard to find and can be the result of a poorly designed WiFi network or a change in the RF environment. Our Wi-Fi health check survey will map out all of the coverage holes in your WiFi network allowing us to help you design more redundancy into your network design.